Summerwater by Sarah Moss

Author:Sarah Moss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

* * *

It’s quiet.

* * *

It’s still quiet.

* * *

There’s wind, of course, and the rain on the roof, but she can hear her own breathing. She coughs, to make a sound. Right then, she thinks, Jon didn’t give her this hour to listen to her own lungs. She has sixty minutes, more or less, to do anything at all, to please herself. She remembers those oceans of time, in London before the children, the weekends and evenings she didn’t even notice, wasted messing around on the internet, watching shows that weren’t quite boring enough to turn off, looking at stuff she wasn’t going to buy and places she wasn’t going to visit. Not that she didn’t also cook for friends and go out dancing and to films and concerts. Which is not the point, because there’s no internet here as well as no friends, and the last thing she wants is to go to the pub, full of damp and depressed young foreign hikers and certainly without cocktail sparklers or probably even cocktail glasses, not that she wants to drink at this hour.

She could dance, she supposes, could be the kind of woman who dances when nobody’s watching, but with the French windows you can’t ever really be sure that nobody’s watching, she sometimes thinks everyone on the park is spending their entire holidays watching each other, and anyway if she wants to dance she can do it with Izzie, sometimes when she doesn’t want to dance she still does it with Izzie, for whom she should find a proper class in September. Ballet, she thinks, remembering her own pink silk shoes and a net skirt she pretended was a tutu, a pink ‘ballet wrap’ knitted by her grandmother who died while Claire was pregnant with Izzie. Gran wanted to hold out to see the first great-grandchild and failed by six weeks, Claire waddling at the funeral, trying not to let her grief seep through her bloodstream and into the baby’s unformed brain. She’s sure she read somewhere recently that they think sadness crosses the placenta, more or less, that a woman who is frightened or upset or depressed in pregnancy steeps her developing child in sorrow, setting up a lifetime of misery. Not that Izzie seems given to misery: irritation, perhaps. Impatience. And such an unfair thing to say, it’s not as if women go round being frightened and upset and depressed on purpose, what are you supposed to do if disarray and death come calling, what if things are, in fact, frightening? Anyway, Claire says out loud, come on, you’ve already spent about three minutes just standing about. If she’s just going to stand here she might as well get on with the cleaning, but that’s not what Jon meant, he’ll be disappointed, feel his gift rejected, if he gets back and finds that’s all she’s done. Have a bath, he said, seeming to forget that she doesn’t actually like baths all that much. Women’s magazines always

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